spotlight on member trish caruso

A Driving Force

Her Fremont home is beautiful, spacious, and party central for her three kids and their friends—and, quite often, for Moms of Multiples as well. But Trish Caruso spends almost as much time in her much smaller “second home”: her car. With identical twin daughters Kristie and Katie attending sixth grade at a private school in Pleasanton and 16-year-old son Michael in public high school in Fremont, Trish logs many a mile on school runs alone. Factor in the kids’ sports, social activities, and a mom’s typical errands, and it’s little wonder that the hardest person to reach on the family’s home telephone is Trish herself. But 30 years ago Trish could never have imagined leading such a car-oriented lifestyle.

Heart of the Home: Trish stepped off a hot career track
to enjoy more time with her husband John, their kids . . .
and on special occasions, John’s mom.

At age 18, having arrived in the Bay Area from her hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to seek her fortune—or at least work for a year to establish residency to attend a California college—Trish’s sole transportation was of the two-wheeler variety. Not yet old enough to rent a car, upon landing in SFO she hopped a bus to a hotel in Sunnyvale, and then rented herself a bicycle, complete with basket for shopping excursions. She also rented a furnished Mountain View apartment, and stocked up on dishware and groceries by making multiple shopping runs on her trusty bike. None of which was easy, given that, as Trish recalls, “Everyone asked me, ‘Are you a runaway?’ “ Landlords and merchants had difficulty believing that the family of a sweet-faced young girl from the nation’s heartland would allow her to strike out on her own, and at least one called her parents—long distance—to make sure she was “allowed” to be here. Indeed she was, and with her parents’ blessing.

Having worked since age 12 in her mom’s CPA business, Trish had managed to save over $5,000 by the time she graduated high school—a queen’s ransom in the mid-‘70s, and more than enough to launch her new life in the golden state. Trish had enjoyed growing up in Sioux Falls, where she swam, boated, and fished in the region’s numerous lakes, skated on the streets when the ice storms blew in, and charged fries and Cokes on her parents’ tab at the local five and dime. But with little fondness for the frigid winter temperatures or small-town gossip, and a decidedly cosmopolitan outlook on life, Trish set her sights on either Boston or San Francisco after high school.

With an eye to eventually attending UC Santa Cruz she headed west, where she admits she didn’t know a soul: “I just got on a plane and went.” Once here, her “very driven” approach to self-reliance quickly paid off. In fact, she landed the first job she applied for, an accounts payable position in an early software development company. The reason? As Trish recalls, “They said, ‘We hired you because we were so impressed you rode your bike here.’ “ Apparently the company managers had spied her arriving on her two-wheeler for her interview, decked out in the formal business attire typical of Sioux Falls—but perhaps considered a little quaint in the burgeoning Silicon Valley.

Fashion sense aside, Trish’s employer quickly realized her mastery of accounting made her overqualified for her position and gave her a promotion. Colleagues soon became friends, as did neighbors in her apartment complex, and as a result, Trish says, although she was far from home and family, “I never felt lonely.” A year later she was ready for school, but passed up UC Santa Cruz in favor of the more business-oriented Santa Clara University, where she earned an accounting degree while continuing to work part-time.

After college graduation Trish took a full-time position as a financial analyst at Micropower, a semiconductor manufacturer, where she met John Caruso, an engineer. But Trish, ever the professional, soon decided that “dating at work wasn’t going to work out very well.” The relationship got a reprieve, however, when Trish took a job in the finance department at Verbatim, a media technology company—a move that forever changed her professional as well as her personal life. Once there she resumed her relationship with John, who had remained at Micropower. She also had a “brilliant” boss who “knew computers were the future and pushed me into it.” He decided Trish should serve as a liaison between the finance division and the small but growing IT department. She proved so adept in this role that when he moved on to Stanford Telecommunications, her boss—by then her mentor—took her along and made her the IT manager at that company. There, she says, the IT department “was basically built up around me,” and as one of only two women working in that high-tech office, she found herself something of a trailblazer. Trish and John dated for several years, and though they never again worked together, they did eventually form a lifelong partnership—by marrying.

Still, Trish was dedicated to her career, and the couple put off having kids for a while. After son Michael was born Trish hired a nanny and returned to work full-time. Several years later, when she became pregnant with twins, her colleagues felt sure she would quit work soon after, if not before, the birth. But Trish worked until the day before she gave birth—which she accomplished without drugs or a cesarean, and with one baby in a breech position. When Katie and Kristie were six weeks old Trish returned to work part-time and “would probably still be working today” if Stanford Telecommunications had not been sold in 2000. With a year’s severance and her company stock fully vested she decided to try her hand as a stay-at-home mom, a transition she found difficult. In some ways, she says, “It’s more rewarding at work because at the end of the day you’ve done ten things.”

Though less tangible, over time she has discovered rewards at home: “Michael needs me more now than when he was little…. My kids really like me being home. They say, ‘Now you never rush us whereas you always used to rush us.’ They like that I’m low-key and not as driven.” Trish has even come to savor life if not in the slow lane, at least in the middle one. In the old days when she’d print something from her computer, “I’d do three other things while I was waiting.” It took a while to reach this level of relaxation, she says, but now, “I just stand at the printer and wait.” —Lisa Crystal

Multiple Coincidences?

When she learned she was expecting twins, Trish Caruso wasn’t that surprised. After all, her husband John has fraternal twin brothers and Trish herself had older fraternal twin sisters—one of whom died, tragically, at age 6 months from spina bifida. In addition, fraternal twins have appeared every other generation on her mother’s side of the family for decades. More surprising was that her own twin girls turned out to be identical. Because she knew that fraternal twinning is not linked with identical twinning, Trish chalked up her identicals to random luck. Then, last summer, Trish made some startling discoveries, first at a family funeral in Texas, then at a gathering of John’s family in Maine. Documents and old photos dug up for the occasions revealed a mind-boggling number of twins—many identical—in both her and John’s families.

Back to the Future:
Trish’s dad tends to her older brother, Michael, and her twin sisters.
A generation later Trish, too, would have a son, Michael, and then twin girls.

On Trish’s side five sets of identicals were discovered, including one from the 1800s; on John’s side his maternal great-aunt and great-uncle alone had three sets of identical twins. In all, 11 sets of identical twins dating back four generations were identified. All of which begs a question: Could there be a hereditary factor in identical twinning? Researchers still say no. Although women can inherit a tendency to ovulate more than once a month—which causes fraternal twinning—there is no firm evidence of a hereditary tendency to zygote splitting.

Multiple identicals within families continue to be written off as nothing more than coincidence. Still, how could so many identical twins within a family be random? A clue may lie in modern reproductive technology. The unusually high rate of identical twinning in fertility procedures has been linked to the abnormally hard density of the membrane surrounding some women’s eggs, which seems to encourage the “split” that results in identical twins. Could membrane density also be inherited among female relatives? And what of the men? Does an as-yet-unknown characteristic of certain sperm contribute to zygote splitting?

As Trish says, “Maybe within our lifetime they’ll find out identical twins are inherited.” In the meantime, she’s compiling information about all these twins as part of an ongoing genealogy project, in which her family has traced its roots back to the 1600s. Trish and her daughters already qualify as Daughters of the Revolution, and, she says, her family is “getting closer to the Mark Twain connection.” Who knows? With Trish’s family history, next she’ll discover that Twain was a twin. —Lisa Crystal

All in the Family:
Last summer Trish’s girls met two sets of identical cousins,
plus one (middle rear) whose twin passed away in babyhood.

Glimpse of the Past:
These identical twin girls were photographed in 1901—
and discovered a century later by their distant cousin Trish.

 

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